Home > Strengthening Families and Communities: 2009 Resource Guide > Chapter 3: Engaging Your Community - Engaging Community Partners

Strengthening Families and Communities: 2009 Resource Guide

Author(s):  Child Welfare Information Gateway, Children's Bureau, FRIENDS National Resource Center For Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention

Year Published:  2009

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You are in section: Table of Contents Letter From the Children’s Bureau About the Resource Guide Protective Factors for Strengthening… Levers for Change: Deepening and Sustaining… Using Evidence to Support Efforts… Promoting the Five Protective… Nurturing and Attachment Knowledge of Parenting and… Parental Resilience Social Connections Concrete Supports for Parents Tools for Engaging Your Community Engaging Community Partners Tips for Working With Specific Groups Talking Points Temas de conversación Sample Press Release for National… Ejemplo de boletín de prensa Sample Public Service Announcements Ejemplo de anuncio de servicio público… Sample Letter to Legislators Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Child Maltreatment National Child Abuse Prevention Partners Federal Interagency Work Group on Child… Using the Tip Sheets for Parents and Caregivers Bonding With Your Baby Usted y su bebé: El lazo que los une Dealing With Temper Tantrums Los berrinches Connecting With Your Teen Cómo relacionarse con su hijo adolescente Teen Parents...You’re Not Alone! Hay muchos padres adolescentes como usted Ten Ways to Be a Better Dad Diez maneras de ser un mejor padre Raising Your Grandchildren Cómo criar al hijo de un pariente

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Chapter 3: Engaging Your Community
Engaging Community Partners

Adapted from the Center for the Study of Social Policy's Strengthening Families Initiative

Successful family strengthening initiatives involve community leaders, agencies, and families working together to make lasting improvements to the community's infrastructure. Partnerships are a great way to make communities more supportive of families and help ensure family health and safety.

Protective factors can serve as a helpful framework for community partnerships supporting stressed and vulnerable families. Many life events bring stress and risk into a family's life—domestic violence, substance abuse, mental health issues, loss of a job, having a child with special needs, even just the process of entering into parenting. When the community works together to strengthen families by building protective factors, families are better able to create a safe and stable base that allows them to respond more effectively to issues that cause stress.

For example, conversations with families struggling with a child's challenging behavior reveal that they often feel very isolated. Their child's behavior can serve as a barrier to accessing both formal and informal supports and services. Parents may feel depressed or self-critical. In these cases, child-centered therapeutic services may be complemented by a broader array of supports that help the family build protective factors.

This section discusses how protective factors can further community prevention work and suggests some activities to support adoption of a community-wide protective-factors framework. The next section offers tips for engaging specific groups in support of a community-wide effort.

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Using the Protective Factors

The protective factors can support your community-based prevention work in many ways. Protective factors can:

• Serve as a framework to help community partners understand what you can offer. Opening the conversation with a discussion around the protective factors will provide an opportunity to identify concrete collaborations that address issues for families under stress.
  
  
• Provide continuity for families. Families under stress often access services from multiple systems and service providers. When a protective-factors approach is used across these systems, it helps ensure a consistent experience for families.
  
  
• Provide a common set of outcomes. Each service system has its own set of goals for the families they serve and the services they provide. Often these goals are focused on preventing specific negative outcomes. Protective factors can provide a common framework for fostering positive outcomes for families across systems.
  
  
• Define a new audience and environment for prevention and family support activities. Traditional prevention activities can also help build the capacity of those who work with families on a day-to-day basis. For example, many family resource centers experience low utilization during the daytime, when many parents are working. This could be an ideal time to work with home-based child care providers who may need family support services themselves, and who can serve as an important channel to reach another set of families who may need support.
  
  

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Suggested Activities

The following activities may be useful in support of adopting a community-wide protective-factors framework:

• Cross-training. Community partners each have their own ways of working with children and families. Training across disciplines can help to create a common understanding of what the protective factors are, which strategies are most effective for strengthening families, and how a protective-factors approach supports each partner's work with children and families.
  
  
• Adapting intake and assessment tools and protocols. Central to this process is moving from a needs-assessment approach to a more comprehensive assessment that looks at the family's needs, strengths, and protective factors. Encourage community providers to integrate a common set of questions, based on the protective factors, into their intake and assessment tools and protocols. This can help ensure that strategies to build protective factors are an integral part of service planning with all families.
  
  
• Creating a consumer voice in relation to protective factors. Many Strengthening Families sites have worked to build plain-language tools that help parents understand what the protective factors are, why they are important, and what families can expect from community partners that are committed to a protective-factors approach. These tools help to ensure that protective factors are built with families.
  
  
• Creating service collaborations. While the protective factors are universal to all families, they may need to be augmented or adapted for families experiencing particular stressors or traumas. In these cases, collaborations based on the protective factors may yield the most effective support system for families. For example, an organization that understands social networking might work with a domestic violence shelter to develop a social-connections strategy that is sensitive to safety-planning issues.

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previous

You are in section: Table of Contents Letter From the Children’s Bureau About the Resource Guide Protective Factors for Strengthening… Levers for Change: Deepening and Sustaining… Using Evidence to Support Efforts… Promoting the Five Protective… Nurturing and Attachment Knowledge of Parenting and… Parental Resilience Social Connections Concrete Supports for Parents Tools for Engaging Your Community Engaging Community Partners Tips for Working With Specific Groups Talking Points Temas de conversación Sample Press Release for National… Ejemplo de boletín de prensa Sample Public Service Announcements Ejemplo de anuncio de servicio público… Sample Letter to Legislators Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Child Maltreatment National Child Abuse Prevention Partners Federal Interagency Work Group on Child… Using the Tip Sheets for Parents and Caregivers Bonding With Your Baby Usted y su bebé: El lazo que los une Dealing With Temper Tantrums Los berrinches Connecting With Your Teen Cómo relacionarse con su hijo adolescente Teen Parents...You’re Not Alone! Hay muchos padres adolescentes como usted Ten Ways to Be a Better Dad Diez maneras de ser un mejor padre Raising Your Grandchildren Cómo criar al hijo de un pariente

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To view or order materials available from the 2009 Resource Guide, please visit our website at: http://www.childwelfare.gov/preventing/res_guide_2009/

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Updated on October 9, 2009